Campaign against Protest Law begins

Protesters launched the first in a series of events against a law criminalizing unauthorized protests on Saturday.

Around 150 people gathered outside the Opera House in Central Cairo as part of a "marathon of freedom" organized by the Revolutionaries Front and proceeded to jog to the nearby Journalists Syndicate. Demonstrators put pictures of detained activists on their shirts and chanted against military rule and Interior Ministry brutality. Some took part on bicycles.

Speakers at a press conference held after the marathon said that the campaign, called Down With the Protest Law and Freedom for the Detainees, is aimed at forcing the repeal of the Protest Law passed at the end of last year and the release of prisoners of conscience. The Protest Law has been widely criticized as putting too many restrictions on the right to protest and granting the Interior Ministry too much power to control demonstrations. Critics allege that its enactment was politically motivated and that it was passed to silence critics of the regime.

Anas al-Sayed, a lawyer from the Hisham Mubarak Law Center said that the law represents a "clear return to a police state". Sayed said that lawyers are currently preparing a memorandum to put forward the legal case against the law. Signatures against the law are also being collected as part of the campaign and lawyers will attempt to calculate how many people have been prosecuted under it since its enactment.

Rights lawyer Ahmed Seif emphasized that the campaign is non-partisan and that its members are "defending everyone's freedom" regardless of political inclinations.

Seif made reference to a recent 11-year prison sentence handed down to a group of Muslim Brotherhood protesters. Four pages of the court's 11-page reasoning made reference to the Protest Law - despite the fact that the defendants were arrested four weeks before the law came into existence.

Detainees' relatives spoke during the press conference. Nourhan Hefzy, wife of Ahmed Douma, the activist who was recently sentenced to three years under the Protest Law together with April 6 activists Mohamed Adel and Ahmed Maher, said that a law requiring Interior Ministry permission for a protest is "an insult to democracy". She said that far from keeping order the law would "create chaos and force young people back onto the streets."

Hefzy said that Douma, Maher and Adel plan to launch a hunger strike against their incarceration in a week's time.

The mother of third year Cairo University engineering student Amr Rabea spoke emotionally about her son, who has been missing since March 11 of this year.

Eyewitnesses report seeing Rabea apprehended by a group of men, some of whom were in police uniform, in Ramses Square and led away. Since then his family have been unable to trace his whereabouts, and have no idea whether he is alive or dead.

Adel's father said that he was not allowed to attend his son's trial and described the current period as "worse than the British occupation. Anyone who expresses his opinion disappears behind the sun."

Hoda Abdel Hamid's husband and son are both currently detained. Her husband is in a military prison in Ismailia while her son, Azhar student Omar Gamal Showeikh, is being held in a police station in Nasr City.

Showeikh was arrested in the Al-Hay Al-Asher area while on his way to his student dorm on March 24. Abdel Hamid told the press conference that her son was beaten while being transported to the police station, and that once he arrived there he was tortured and sexually assaulted while being interrogated about his involvement in protests.

"The one day they took his blindfold off and sat him on a sofa and pointed a video camera at him. An officer behind the camera told him to repeat everything he says and that if he didn't he'd have worse treatment than he had already experienced," Abdel Hamid said, adding that Showeikh did not tell her this in person but smuggled out his testimony in a letter.

"Are they punishing us for January 25?" she asked.

Upcoming events as part of the campaign include the formation of human chains on bridges in governorates throughout Egypt at 5 pm on Wednesday and protests demanding the release of Ahmed al-Gezawy, an Egyptian imprisoned in Saudi Arabia, on April 17. The campaign will culminate in a protest outside the Ettehadiya Presidential Palace in Cairo on April 26.